"Bibi" Makes a War Criminal Sound Like a Teddy Bear

They did not call him Dolphi in 1939. They should not call him Bibi in 2026.

There is a small, almost invisible violence in the way the Western press and the independent media sphere talk about the Prime Minister of Israel. It is not in the headlines about the bombs nor in the photographs of the rubble that was once a hospital, the rubble that was once a school, the rubble that was once a bakery where people stood in line for bread and were killed for standing in line for bread. It is in a single word, repeated thousands of times across thousands of articles, spoken by anchors in the measured tones of professional neutrality, printed in the headlines of newspapers that still imagine themselves to be serious.

Bibi.

It is the word a mother uses for a child, the word a wife uses across a kitchen table, the word that signals affection, intimacy, harmlessness. It’s cutesy. You know? the linguistic equivalent of a soft hand on a cheek. And it is being applied, day after day, year after year, to a man who has presided over the most thoroughly documented genocide of the…